Final answer:
Margaret Mead was an influential cultural anthropologist whose research in various cultures, specifically in New Guinea and Samoa, showed that gender roles and behaviors have significant cultural variations, thus challenging the notion that they are biologically determined.
Step-by-step explanation:
Margaret Mead was a cultural anthropologist who made significant contributions to challenging traditional gender stereotypes. Through her fieldwork in New Guinea, as discussed in her 1935 book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead found that gender roles and behaviors were not universal but varied greatly among different cultures. Her research demonstrated that among the Arapesh and Mundugumor tribes, men and women exhibited similar temperaments, thus opposing the idea that gendered behaviors were purely biological. In Samoan society, Mead's earlier work, Coming of Age in Samoa, highlighted a more relaxed attitude toward sexuality, suggesting that gender roles and sexual norms were culturally rather than biologically determined.
In her research, Mead observed that the experiences of adolescence and sexual socialization were quite distinct between Samoans and Americans, with the former having more freedom and the latter subject to repression and strict discipline. Such findings controversially suggested that many aspects of gender and sexuality were relative to one's culture and upbringing, rather than fixed and unchangeable. Therefore, Mead's work provided a scientific basis for rethinking the role of culture in the formation of gender identity and fueled subsequent movements for gender equality and the study of gender as a social construct.